


history is also everybody talking at once

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Banter, Canon-Typical Violence, Dancing, Gen, Historical References, Light Angst, Minor Rufus Carlin/Jiya, Pining, Post-Season/Series 02, Some Humor, Star Wars References, Time Travel, Vodka
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 12,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27672026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Chapters are self-contained; this is a collection of drabbles and ficlets set after "Chinatown" but before the defeat of Rittenhouse. The title is from the work of historianElsa Barkley Brown.
Relationships: Garcia Flynn & Lucy Preston, Garcia Flynn/Lucy Preston, Jiya & Lucy Preston, Rufus Carlin & Wyatt Logan & Lucy Preston
Comments: 54
Kudos: 51





	1. Aftermath

Through a haze of exhaustion he looks at her, curled up in the opposite corner of the couch, and wonders when it began, this hair-raising awareness of her.

Perhaps, thinks Flynn, it was in São Paulo. Perhaps it was then, although he had been in no state to realize it at the time. Perhaps it was in that encounter, which he had replayed, reimagined, reconstructed so many times. She had been a stranger to him, and she had looked at him with incandescent confidence. Her knee had brushed his under the bar; she had pulled away before he could. Carefully she had kept her fingers from touching his when she had handed over the journal. And then — finally, impulsively, shatteringly — she had leaned forward, and kissed him. Her lips had grazed his cheek, hot and startling as shrapnel. And then she had smiled, and disappeared.

It is an irony, and perhaps a just punishment, that he should be so acutely conscious of what Lucy feels like. He knows the taut length of her body against his (merely circumstantial, in front of the Hindenburg, until it was the only fact that mattered, until he was aware of every inch of her, until Wyatt, with impressive and liberating precision, shot him.) He knows the weight of her, pushed desperately out of harm’s way. He knows the slim bones of her wrist, caught in his hand. He knows her very fingers, allowed to brush his on the journal the second time. He knows the warmth of her brachial pulse. He knows her waist, clasped against him in a moment when he feared it would not be enough to save her. He knows the tension of her hand on a gun, the desperation of her hands, clutching at him. And still he cannot but think of her as untouchable, this beautiful and splendid creature.

Lucy looks up from her book. “Flynn.”

“Hm?”

“You okay?” The question is soft, and he struggles to formulate an answer to it. “It’s just… you looked miles away.”

_Far too near_. He swallows hard, forces himself to moisten his lips. “Fine.” He is burning with the knowledge of her, chilled with the lack of it.

“Mm,” says Lucy skeptically. On missions, her transparency has struck terror to his heart. And now she looks at him with furrowed brow, her eyes limpid, large with anxiety, and he cannot wish her other than she is. Lucy closes her book on one finger, tucks her knees under herself, and leans across the space between them. The back of her hand is cool against his forehead; he closes his eyes, and tries not to lean into the touch.

“You’re feverish,” she says, half accusingly. He chuckles. “It’s not something to laugh at.”

“It’s normal,” says Flynn. “After injury, it’s… normal, a low fever.” She is still frowning at him, serious and concerned, the planes of her face distorted by bruises, by the swelling that has not yet fully gone down. She is still, he thinks, heart-wrenchingly beautiful. “Lucy,” he says, because he can think of nothing else.

She smiles. “Okay.” The ancient couch creaks with her movement. “Well,” says Lucy, leaning against his good shoulder, “don’t think I won’t report you to Agent Christopher if your temperature goes up.”

Flynn swallows. He can smell her hair; the very curve of her hip seems confiding against his. “Understood,” he says. Let her still be untouchable. She will consent to be close to him, and that is — it must be — miracle enough.


	2. Endurance

Lucy knows she shouldn’t ask the question. But she is very tired, and despairing at the thought of another night on the couch with its familiar creaks and ridges and…

“How do you do it?”

Flynn runs his good hand through his hair. Once, she thinks, he might have scoffed, or maintained a scathing silence. Now, he scrubs the same hand over his face.

“You mean… taking aim at another human being and…”

“No,” says Lucy quickly. “No. I’ve done that,” she adds; her voice is hard and bitter in her own ears. He meets her eyes, and she relents before his palpable exhaustion. “I mean,” she says, “enduring.”

He smiles, and briefly closes his eyes. “Love.” His gaze, holding hers, is steady.

Lucy shakes her head, lips pressed into a white line. “No. No. My mother loved me, and it was like — like being consumed, and being used, and…”

“Amy,” says Flynn, and her mouth goes dry. “Amy, and Iris, and Lorena, and…” He moistens his lips. “It is loving,” he says, “not the assurance that we are loved.” Lucy finds that she can only stare at him. “Perhaps that is a cruel thing,” says Flynn.

“Perhaps,” says Lucy.


	3. Paradise Lost

_Among the faithless, faithful only he_. Lucy knows that it is not really fair to the others. Rufus she had loved like a brother: the brother she never had and always wanted, who trusted her and teased her. Rufus she had loved, and Rufus is dead. Jiya will plot and pilot her own course, as she has always had to do. Lucy only hopes that she will consent to stay with them all, now that she is so sorely needed. Lucy has come to love Denise, and to trust that Denise cares for her too, and for them all. But her first loyalty is, as it must be, to her job. Connor… well, Lucy hopes that he won’t disappear into a whiskey bottle. She wouldn’t blame him if he did.

Lucy rubs her eyes. It’s only 10 p.m., and it feels like the dead watches of the night. The computer screen in front of her is blurring, as she tries to read scans of eighteenth-century handwriting from the Library of Congress. Maybe somewhere, hiding behind bland catalogue entries, is the one piece of vital information that will change everything, that will make the whole picture make sense. Or at least, enough small pieces of information to change their knowledge of the landscape, to help them navigate it better. This dual temptation, this dual promise, has always been what has drawn her to history. But now, if she misses something, if she can’t figure out where to look, it’s a matter of survival. Lucy will never look at grant proposals the same way again.

She is conscious of tensing up when Wyatt comes into the kitchen. And she tries to relax her shoulders; she tries to remind her body of what it was like when there was easy camaraderie and trust between them. He has suffered so much, and lost so much, and not being able to talk to him feels somehow unfair to both of them. She too has suffered; she too has lost. And Wyatt, with a single, sheepish smile for her, returns to his room.

Flynn is asleep on the couch. They’re still trying to trace the aftermath of 1780, the mission that, until losing Rufus, she would have counted as their worst failure. It’s her job, of course, to do so. But Flynn had come, and stood by her until she raised her eyes to him.

“Lucy, I… Do you want me to take the records in German?” She had told herself that it was stupid to be disappointed, stupid to have expected, however vaguely, something else. He had surrounded himself with the books she had ordered from Denise, patiently combing manuscript catalogues and monograph footnotes. And now… He is still holding a book open in his lap with his right hand, propping his head up with his left. Lucy worries that he’ll be miserable if he doesn’t take the next round of pain meds soon. It is not that sort of fortitude, though, that most astonishes her. She is impossibly exhausted by loss. And he has fought through that exhaustion for so long. Among the faithless, faithful only he.

She had taken a Milton class in her senior year of undergrad. She had finished her history major with credits to spare before graduation, so she sat around a seminar table contemplating _Paradise Lost_ with 8 other women and a professor who looked like a Caravaggio apostle in blue jeans. Mom had thought she should do something useful, like statistics. _Among the faithless, faithful only he; / Among innumerable false, unmoved, / Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, / His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal…_ Stiffly Lucy stands up from her chair. She tells herself that she should be able to look at him without seeing again his blood. She tells herself that she should be able to look at his face without wanting to cry.

“Flynn,” says Lucy, and he opens his eyes.

“Oprostite, sorry, I…” He seems to take stock more fully of his surroundings. “I’m sorry.” He smiles ruefully. “Some help.”

“You were,” says Lucy. “You are.” She takes his left hand in hers. “Come on — up, before the couch eats you.” He obeys, and stands in front of her, and sways only slightly. “It’s good to know you have my back.”

“I…” He moistens his lips. “I promise to try.”

“I know you do,” says Lucy, unhesitating. She cannot quite work out how to say: _You let me find you when you were ready to die. You came to find me when I was ready to kill._ “I know you do,” says Lucy. “We’ll save the world again tomorrow.” 

“Yes,” says Flynn, and she finds herself believing him.


	4. Pasts, Futures

Lucy Preston isn’t sleeping well. That is no great novelty. What bothers her more is the sense of not being able to trust her instincts — not about history, not about people, not about herself. Her mother had said she’d regretted not raising her truthfully. _Truthfully._ Any other word would have been easier to ignore. But she’d been raised to search for truth and sift for it, and now… Now, history is unravelling around her. Sometimes she can’t tell whether she’s shoring it up or rearranging proverbial deckchairs while Rittenhouse continues its destruction. More painfully still, she can’t figure out whether the mother she knew didn’t exist, or whether she had simply believed a lie. Mom had read to her from history books… had she been waiting all the while for the day when they could reshape history? And what would happen then? Would there be children’s books about Nonhelema? Harriet Tubman? About Albert Einstein, who had spoken about racism as a disease, who had believed in a God who was subtle but not malicious?

Lucy yawns, and sits up, and wraps the lighter of the blankets around her shoulders. _I want some love that's true — yes, I do, 'deed I do, you know I do_. Always looking for love, always afraid that she’s receiving charity instead: charity for the gawky girl with glasses, whose dull hair and bright opinions were alike embarrassing. A few hot, self-pitying tears slide down her cheeks. Had it been so absurd, to hope for something more than filling the place where a man wanted another woman to be? Had it been so absurd to allow herself to _want_? Lucy sniffles, and wipes her tears roughly away. She tells herself that she should have known. There had been — perhaps from the beginning — that prickling of possibility under the skin. But they had lain side by side in 1934 Louisiana, and he had told her about his first love. Well. She supposes that that’s what love is, the kind that counts: the kind that survives betrayal and anger and absence. It had sent Wyatt running headlong, the mere hope of it. Who, she asks herself bitterly, would run like that for her?

And who, indeed, is she? She had looked at photograph albums and not recognized herself. She remembers her twenties as a time of brief flirtations and long evenings in Stanford’s library. And yet some version of herself had become engaged, to a medical doctor who was kind and thoughtful and… perfectly unexceptionable. It seems unkind to think: _boring._ It seems ungracious, somehow, to Noah and to herself, to feel that the photos of Caribbean beaches, with them both half-clothed and entirely carefree, cannot be quite real. What had happened to the Lucy whose idea of a riotous time was playing feminist theory drinking games with Amy while watching trashy television?

Lucy shivers, and half-fills the electric kettle. It won’t wake her teammates, surely. And she is so very cold. She stands on tiptoe to reach the cupboard over the stove, stretches to reach the peppermint tea. That she gets it down without the box hitting her in the face or teabags flying over the floor counts as a victory.

“Lucy.”

She yelps, and jumps. “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry, sorry…” Flynn doesn’t speak again. But when she’s done trying to trip backwards out of his way, she finds his sound hand hovering near her elbow.

“Sorry,” says Lucy again. “Do you… do you want tea?”

“Thank you.”

The mugs she can get without reaching higher than her shoulder. Looking at his face, Lucy thinks better of asking whether she woke him; he doesn’t look like a man who’s sleeping. He had told her once that he didn’t; she wonders if that’s still true.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says, as if it were an explanation.

“No.” The single syllable sounds like a confession as well as an agreement. Lucy pours the hot water over the teabags. She wraps her arms more tightly about herself.

“It’s just…” she says. _Everything._ “We don’t have a very good track record,” she says shakily, “of recovering our dead.”

“No,” says Flynn again.

“And,” pursues Lucy, determined to confront the worst of it, “why did they just say Rufus? Why just Rufus, and not…” _Amy. Lorena. Iris. Mom. The people we love._

“I don’t know, Lucy.”

“No insights?” She hears herself asking the question. “No clues from the version of time where I handed you a journal and told you we could win this war?” She could wish the words unsaid; but strangely, she finds that she doesn’t.

“No,” says Flynn, at last and for the third time. After another pause, he adds: “You didn’t… you didn’t tell me we could win it.”

“Oh, great.” _Even my past self is letting us down now._

“Lucy,” says Flynn, as if it were a plea. She looks up to meet his eyes. “You convinced me,” he says deliberately, “that it was a war worth fighting.”

“Oh.” She tells herself that it is stupid to cry. But she does, quietly, into her tea, and Flynn does not tell her not to, or that she shouldn’t. _Of what can I be certain, when I am not even certain of myself?_ Lucy forces herself to take a deep breath. And then she wonders if the answer is, in a literal sense, in front of her. He is pale and weary and grieved. Pain has deepened the lines in his face, cast shadows underneath his cheekbones. But he is here: standing in the kitchen at 1 in the morning, drinking peppermint tea, one arm still in a sling, convinced that they cannot, should not, be doing other than they are.

Briefly Lucy worries her lower lip between her teeth. “I still trust you, you know.”

Flynn smiles, and ceremoniously inclines his head. “Likewise, Professor.”

“Good,” says Lucy Preston. “Good.”


	5. Pennsylvania, 1812

Lucy shivers as she comes awake. There is a knotted muscle underneath her left shoulder-blade, and a tree root under her cheek, perceptible even through the folds of her cloak. Lucy shivers again, and sits up, and chafes her arms. She blinks, and realizes that it is must be dawn: she can make out the trees on the opposite side of the clearing, the colors of Wyatt and Rufus’ cloaks next to her. A moment later, she realizes that in 1812, she should not be able to smell coffee.

He does not move as she approaches; she wonders when he learned to recognize her step. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he returns; she wonders when she learned to expect his smile.

“You smuggled coffee.”

Flynn chuckles. “I did.”

“You are incorrigible.”

“Among my better qualities…”

“Ha ha,” says Lucy, and settles herself next to him, her arms around her knees. “You were supposed to wake me for last shift,” she says softly, after a few minutes.

“Well.” He stirs the fire, which sends up a pop and a spray of sparks. “Can’t have our historian sleep-deprived.” 

“Mm.” Lucy regards him in silence for several moments. She does not think it is only the early light that makes him look pale. “And what about you?”

“Ah,” says Flynn, “well.” He hands her a tin mug of coffee. “I don’t sleep, in any case. I told you.” He is matter-of-fact about it; but Lucy swallows painfully. “Besides,” he adds, “this way you get Wyatt fighting while caffeinated. I think you might come out ahead in the trade.”

Lucy sighs. There are at least two conversations, she thinks, happening just beneath the surface of this one. But they are not conversations to be had in the Allegheny Forest in the autumn of 1812. The birds are getting louder, and Wyatt and Rufus are stirring. “Just… you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

He looks at her sharply; for a moment there is only incredulity in his expression, and then it is succeeded by shock. And then, very gravely, Flynn nods.

“Thank you,” breathes Lucy. “Hey, Wyatt,” she adds aloud, “there’s coffee.”

“Hm, what?” Wyatt is still rubbing sleep from his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“You’re welcome,” says Flynn. He hands Wyatt a mug. His look is for her.


	6. Frankfurt, 1848

“It’s all going to happen,” says Lucy. “It’s all really going to happen! here!” 

“Yes,” agrees Flynn, scanning the irregular square in front of the Nikolaikirche. As far as the other coffee shop patrons are concerned, they are an English couple whose continental peregrinations have taken them, unusually, north of the Alps.

“Did you know,” continues Lucy, excitement gradually winning out over awe, “that the previous thirty years or so are called the Vormärz? I love that — all these currents of people and ideas circulating and bouncing off each other and ending up _here._ ”

“Extraordinary,” says Flynn. He should give her a better answer, he supposes, but more than half his attention is still occupied with trying to locate the agent — or agents — who are planning to disrupt the parliamentary meetings. They don’t know if they’re looking for an ostensible anarchist with a bomb, or something more subtle, and perhaps even more dangerous.

“You’re not listening properly,” says Lucy reproachfully.

“I am,” Flynn assures her. She is never more beautiful, he thinks, than in these moments, alight with her extravagant love for all the fine hopes of history. “I am,” he says again. “Universities incubating their thinkers and Heine writing his poetry on the Rhine and _Michael Kohlhaas_ being passed from hand to hand… I am listening.”

“Well,” says Lucy, mollified, “the parliament still gets known as a failure. I don’t think that’s fair, really. They didn’t accomplish what they set out to do — and don’t look at me like that, I don’t think we could fix it, even if we wanted to. With political units this tiny, and liberal identities so new? Any kind of formal federation…” She sighs, then brightens again. “But the ideas were there — here. And the people were here. And it set a precedent. I can’t imagine 1871 happening without it.”

“Or 1968,” suggests Flynn.

“Or 1968.” She smiles at him, and then her smile twists. “We are going to get out of this, aren’t we?”

He’s told himself he’ll never again make a promise he can’t keep. Still: “Yes,” says Flynn.


	7. Virginia, 1862

“So,” says Lucy, “horses.” 

“Mm.” The intonation, the turn of his head, are just enough to assure her that he’s awake. Both sets of reins are held easily in his hand. Within the modestly protective shell of her hoop skirt, Lucy is trying to do Pilates. 

“Horses,” she says again. The dun-colored mare she has been riding cocks an eye at her. “How are you… like this with them?”

Flynn opens one eye. “Meaning?”

Lucy gestures demonstratively at the black gelding that has moved from nibbling grass to nibbling Flynn’s ear, apparently no less contentedly. Flynn reaches to scratch it under the chin, as though it weren’t a half-ton killing machine that could crush his bones with a careless step. The horse responds by shoving him in the shoulder, apparently as a gesture of affection. 

Flynn smiles; Lucy thinks he’s far too relaxed for a man who is flirting with death (and possibly her, but that’s an issue for another time.) “I did tell you,” he says, “that I wanted to be a cowboy.”

Despite herself, Lucy laughs, then. Flynn looks transparently delighted by this. “I guess…” she says, and then decides to forge onwards. What the hell. They’re working together despite betrayals of which she’s lost count; surely one more weakness won’t ruin his opinion of her. “I don’t know how you can relax around them,” she says. “I mean, they’re huge, for one thing — could definitely crush you, and me a lot more easily — and then they just decide to slow down or speed up or nibble grass or…”

“They’re animals, Lucy,” says Flynn, so easily that she cannot suspect him of condescension. She sighs gustily. “Just…” He does the clicking thing with his tongue that Lucy tells herself she should _not_ be speculating about, and her mare picks up suddenly dainty feet and comes over to him. “Spoil her a little,” suggests Flynn.

Lucy squints at what he has in his hand. “Of course you have stolen lumps of sugar from a Confederate encampment to feed to your horse. You’re impossible.”

“Your horse,” says Flynn, and there is an undercurrent of laughter in his voice. “Relax, Lucy.”

“I’d be more relaxed,” she hisses, “if you had any sense of self-preservation.”

Flynn rolls over on one elbow to look at her, his eyes suddenly serious. “I meant in the saddle,” he says, “but… thank you.”


	8. After Antietam

Flynn knows that Lucy is upset, and he knows that it’s his fault. She has been frightened, badly (and God, the knowledge sits in his chest like another wound, making it difficult to draw breath.) He has it on good authority from Wyatt that she barely slept, in 1862. And he knows that they’ve all had to deal with an upbraiding from Denise about staying in the past in the first place. Jiya creeps into his room, one of the first nights after their return.

“How bad is it?”

“That’s my line,” she whispers back. “Connor’s just… running probabilities. It’s his job. And the Lifeboat’s his. And I say that I’ve souped her up enough that she wouldn’t run out of charge on you. And I also say that we’d quite like to keep you.” She stretches out a hand, as if to touch him, then pulls it back, turning away. She sniffles.

“Jiya,” says Flynn. Another sniffle. “Jiya, _okhti, habibti_ , don’t cry.” This attempt at consolation backfires spectacularly; Jiya bursts into tears and buries her face in the bedclothes. On the rail of the cot her knuckles are white. Slowly, carefully, Flynn works his hand around so that he can half-stroke her hair. When he wakes up again, she is gone.

“Do you know something about chest wounds in the Civil War?” asks Wyatt the next morning, without preamble.

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“Yeah,” says Wyatt, and thrusts the plastic cup with its straw under Flynn’s nose. “They didn’t treat them.”

Flynn swallows. His throat is still dry. “What?”

“They didn’t treat them. That was triage. You get one of your limbs messed up, that’s one thing: they fix it up or they cut it off, usually the latter. If they fix it up and it gets infected, then they cut it off. Problem solved. Of course, there’s always the possibility that your system goes into shock. But they didn’t — ” Wyatt is practically shaking — “they didn’t treat chest wounds. Too much damage, too little information, too little chance of survival. Put ’em in a heap and hope for the best.”

“So,” says Flynn, and swallows again, “so… I was treated because…”

“Why do you think?” says Wyatt. “Lucy.” He shakes his head. “Just… be decent to her.”

Flynn is far too tired to figure out what this means, or what an appropriate response might be. He must make a noise of some kind, because Wyatt nods in acknowledgement, turns on his heel, and leaves. 

Lucy herself does not come for some time. (He is not quite sure of the days, of the hours.) When she does appear, she is too pale, and too thin, and wearing one of his sweaters.

“Lucy.”

“Don’t.” Her voice is dangerously close to snapping. “Don’t do that.” She is trembling, her fingers fiddling at her side, as if worrying at an invisible thread. 

“Lucy.” It is a plea. “Tell me.”

“I can’t.” She is still shaking. “I will not — I will not.” She turns on him, her fists clenched. “I refuse. I refuse. I will not bargain with time and death to leave me… to leave me something, anything…” She does not move to wipe away her tears. “You said we’d be a team,” she says, and her voice is weary. “Is this what you meant?” There is still anger there, under the weariness. “Just… just the fighting? Nothing else but the risk of your death, again and again and — ” 

“Lucy,” says Flynn. He swallows. “Lucy, I could not have imagined living without you. I cannot imagine it. That… that…” And on that, with a noise in her throat that might be desperation, or relief, or even anger, Lucy kisses him.


	9. Vodka, midnight

“Lucy.”

“Hm?” It takes her a moment to rouse herself, raking her fingers through her hair.

“ ’S late.”

“Late yourself,” she says, and regrets it.

“Mm,” says Flynn. When he pads away, she presumes that he’s returning to his room, after whatever midnight compulsions have driven him to the common area. But a moment later she hears the cupboards in the kitchen, a faint clinking of glasses.

He holds out the bottle of vodka like a peace offering.

“Good idea.”

“Past, present, or future?” he asks, apparently easily. “Or… no questions?”

Lucy sighs. “Past. I think.” She clinks her tumbler against his. “I just…” She gestures at the untidy stacks of books on the table. “How much has changed? I need to _know_ these things.”

A non-committal hum. “You still know where to find them,” suggests Flynn. “And how.”

“It’s my job,” says Lucy, and hopes she doesn’t sound defensive, or merely petulant. She yawns. “It’s what I’m here to do. And if I can’t — if I can’t do that… One of the first things I teach the history majors is how much goes into creating the narrative they all think they know: how we find information and interpret it.” She finishes her drink at one go, enjoying the rush. “And we’re creating new narratives all the time.”

“Yes,” agrees Flynn, and he refills their glasses. For some minutes they are silent. Lucy tucks her feet under her, settles more comfortably into the couch.

“Any reason you’re up?”

“Oh…” He shakes his head. But just when she has decided that she’s stumbled over an invisible boundary, he says: “Past.”

“Oh,” says Lucy in turn. The ensuing silence lasts long enough that it ceases to be uncomfortable; it becomes something familiar, something that enfolds them.

“If you ever need a research assistant,” says Flynn, his voice hoarse with sleep, “you have only to ask.”

“Mmph,” says Lucy indistinctly. “That’s nice.” 

She falls asleep against his shoulder.


	10. London, 1912

Lucy Preston fiddles nervously with the gold brocade at her shoulder. What she says aloud is: “It’s past my bedtime.”

Flynn laughs, almost noiselessly. Looking up at him, she wishes it did not still surprise her, to see him at ease, even briefly. She wishes she did not find it so dangerously affecting. _Let us survive_ , she prays to Fate. _Let us have a life with laughter_. “Sorry, Professor,” says Flynn, still scanning the ballroom. “No one said saving the world was easy.”

“Well,” she says, swallowing her punch, “nudge me if I’m about to do something stupid.”

“Impossible.”

“Flatterer.” 

He turns to look at her then. “Lucy.”

She swallows hard. “What?”

He moistens his lips. “Do you know how to waltz?”

“I… had lessons.”

“Good,” says Flynn, and offers one white-gloved hand. Lucy takes a deep breath, and steps into his formal embrace.

The music itself, she finds, is surprisingly graceful: a little hushed, at first, half tentative. The dancers find their rhythm and the waltz’s, and then more instruments join, and it quickens like a pulse.

“It was composed for a wedding,” says Flynn lightly.

“Oh.” They are surrounded by other couples — women in silks and feathers, men in swallow-tail coats — but for once, Lucy isn’t worried about stumbling into them. Flynn moves with the practiced assurance of one for whom awareness of the body has long been a matter of instinct.

Between the heat from the gas lamps and the cognac in the punch, Lucy understands in new and vivid ways why ballrooms in second-rate Victorian novels are said to whirl. Gravity is something outside her. She is not anchored through her feet on the floor; she is held upright by the tension between her palm and her partner’s, by the warmth of his hand at the small of her back. She is weightless, and the world is flecked with gold.

“Lucy?”

She brings her gaze into focus on one mother-of-pearl shirt stud. “Yes,” she says, a little breathlessly. “I’m fine.”

“Good. I have one of them marked.”

“Oh.” She stumbles, suddenly out of step with Strauss. Her left hand closes convulsively on his upper arm. “Don’t…”

Flynn smiles. “Challenge him to a duel? I won’t.”

“He might be armed.”

“He is. He’s standing at parade rest and has avoided the eyes of three annoyed matrons trying to get dances for debutantes. The gun is in his waistband.”

“Oh,” says Lucy again.

“Come over faint,” says Flynn softly, “and I’ll hand you to a matron. She’ll wax indignant on his bad manners, and I’ll have a word.”

“Good,” says Lucy, and lets her knees buckle.

It seems a long few minutes. Lucy tries to concentrate on making conversation. She perks up when the tallest of the debutantes raises the subject of Mrs. Pankhurst’s latest address. When Flynn returns, she is trying not to be anachronistic about the suffrage question. She flicks her eyes to his sleeve; obeying the look, he refastens his cufflink. He bows to the knot of women, and asks the tallest debutante to dance. The conversation moves from suffrage to Bernard Shaw. 

“My dear,” says Lucy, when the dancers return.

“Of course.” They make their goodnights; she leans gratefully on his arm. The night air is bracingly clear, as well as cool. The newly electrified street lamps throw incongruously bright pools of light.

“What happened to the gun?”

“I buried it.” He smiles down at her. “With luck, the rhododendrons and the archaeological record will be undisturbed.”

Lucy swallows. “That’s not what I was most worried about.”

“Ah,” says Flynn. The street around them seems very quiet. “I hope they’ll believe that he broke his neck in a fall.”

“Yes,” says Lucy. “We didn’t,” she adds, “get to finish our waltz.” 

Flynn’s eyes on her are dark. “Some other time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” says Lucy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lucy's dress is inspired by this one: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/81139
> 
> A brief biography of Emmeline Pankhurst may be found here: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emmeline-Pankhurst


	11. Moscow, 1914

All Lucy can think is, stupidly: _that’s a bomb._ “Don’t,” she says, and her lips tremble around the word, and her extended hand trembles. They’ve come too late; she wasn’t quick enough; she should have known where in Moscow to look for the _Rabotnitsa_ offices, and now they’re too late. Lucy knows the newspaper doesn’t have long — a few issues before it’s shut down. But the woman currently staring down the bomb as though it’s a man with uninformed opinions has decades of work ahead of her. Or she should.

Lucy glances over at Flynn. He’s been translating for her, and is now addressing Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein in tense, impassioned Russian. The other woman’s jaw is set. Lucy has to admire Rittenhouse’s attention to detail. This is no high-tech, remote-controlled explosive. This is the kind of thing that anarchists terrified the political establishment of Europe with: homemade and crude, with nothing predictable about its workings, nothing to tell you whether or when it might go off. Lucy had hoped Flynn’s knowledge of explosives might give them some chance of escape she can’t yet see. But he meets her eyes, and simply shakes his head.

Lucy swallows, blinks away tears. This is it, then. This is how she’s going to die: on a beautiful spring day in 1914, alongside Russia’s first female gynecologist and the man who’s become her closest ally, her unlikeliest friend.

“Flynn,” says Lucy, “I…” Before she can finish the thought (I’m so sorry, I’m glad you’re here, I’m so sorry), he has taken Dr. Shishkina-Iavein around the midriff, and — it takes Lucy a moment to process — launched himself out the window. The next instant, she is standing alone with the ring of shattering glass, the cries from the street, and the ticking bomb. Well. With one backward glance at the explosive device on the table, Lucy grabs as many article proofs as she can, stuffs them into her shirtwaist, and begins to climb out of the window. She is grateful for the gloves that allow her to gingerly grasp the window frame, with its jagged edges. She still lands a little awkwardly on the pavement, but she doesn’t think her ankle is twisted. Thank goodness they were on the first floor. 

“Lucy!” bellows Flynn, and she crouches against the wall, and the blast goes off.

Coughing and dazed and deafened, her next coherent thought is: _at least it wasn’t a very good bomb._ The front of the building is almost entirely intact. Out of the shattered window have flown pieces of furniture, scorched confetti that are all the remains of Rabotnitsa. Fluent Russian cursing tells Lucy how to orient herself. Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein is standing up, vigorously brushing herself off, and no less vigorously commenting on the state of things generally. Lucy stumbles a little, going forward. Is he…? Flynn is, it turns out, getting to his feet unaided, albeit more slowly than his companion and cargo. He staggers slightly when he gets there, but he meets Lucy’s eyes, and grins. Lucy lets out a breath.

“Ah,” says Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, “ma chère mademoiselle…” and begins, rather astonishingly, to talk to Lucy in rapid if accented French about the goals of the feminist movement and the importance of international solidarity. As they head down the street arm in arm, Lucy reflects that this would be a surreal experience even if she weren’t still a little light-headed from, oh yes, nearly getting blown up.

“Il est un peu fou, celui-là,” says Dr. Shishkina-Iavein, “mais c’est un homme précieux.”

“Je suis complètement d’accord,” says Lucy, and it feels like a pale substitute for I couldn’t agree more. He has fallen a little behind them, now, doubtless checking to see if they are being followed, making sure that he can keep an eye on the road ahead of them for potential dangers.

At last they are at the hotel where Dr. Shishkina-Iavein insists that yes, she’ll be quite all right and quite safe, thank you, and it’s been a pleasure, Mademoiselle…?

“Docteur,” says Lucy, flushing slightly. “Docteur, er, Poulain.” Dr. Shishkina-Iavein shakes her hand still more vigorously, proceeds to do the same to Flynn — slightly tactless, Lucy thinks, in view of his bruises — and vanishes, her magnificent posture intact, into the tiled entryway. Flynn’s sigh of relief is audible.

“Well,” says Lucy a little weakly, “we managed it. And we’re French?”

“Yes,” says Flynn. “She — you mentioned that she’d emigrated to Paris after the war, so…” He starts to shrug, winces. “I thought I’d put in a good word. We’re like-minded activists.”

Lucy exhales. “Good.” She wonders how long it will be before she can stop reminding herself to breathe normally. “Are you…?”

“Bruised,” says Flynn wryly, “but I’ll recover.”

Lucy swallows, and steps towards him. “You look…” Tired. Like a criminal. Like a hero. “You look a mess.”

“I’m sure.”

Very carefully, she reaches up to brush broken glass from his shoulders, from his sleeves. He shivers slightly under her touch, and she wonders if it is only the aftermath of shock. “We should head back to the Lifeboat,” she says.

“Yes,” agrees Flynn; and so, arm in arm, they do.


	12. The Bunker

Lucy Preston has lost track of time. Barely twenty-four hours ago, she was in Gilded Age New York, among millionaires and Greenwich Village feminists. And now she is sitting on an aged sofa, wondering what comes next.

“Tea,” says Flynn’s voice, “or wine?”

She looks up at him, smiles. “Is it that late?”

“It is.”

“Wine, then.”

She lets her breath out when he returns, surprised to feel her shoulders drop in relief when he sits down. She takes the glass of red in both hands. “Thanks.” She leans her head against his shoulder, takes the first sip: sweetness and warmth.

“Better?” asks Flynn, after a few moments.

“Mm.” She moves to lean more comfortably against him; wordlessly he accepts this. “I think,” says Lucy slowly, “that we’re all a little stronger than we think we are. But it’s hard to remember that sometimes.” 

“Mm,” says Flynn in turn. “That might be true for most of us.”

“But?”

“But,” he says, “I think you are infinitely stronger than you have ever dared to imagine.” 

Deliberately, Lucy finishes raising her glass to her lips, tastes the dark richness of hope before turning to face him. “Flynn,” she says, “kiss me.”


	13. Mississippi River, 1832

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Time Team gets involved in the Black Hawk War, on what will not be Sauk land for much longer.

Lucy sits very still. She is conscious of the gooseflesh on her arms, her own hair standing on end, a tell that she cannot prevent.

“He won’t tell,” says Rufus firmly.

“He’ll be in no condition to lie,” retorts Wyatt.

Lucy presses her lips together, and she presses her palms flat against the ground. She wishes that she didn’t know what Flynn looked like when he was close to breaking.

_I asked God for answers_ … White and trembling and ready to end his own life, but not hers. _What if he led you to me?_ she’d asked. And now she sits, knowing he is being tortured, and does nothing to stop it.

“I’d suggest disguising ourselves as Storm Troopers,” says Rufus, “but that is literally the only idea I have, and I have a funny feeling that it wouldn’t fly in 1832.”

Lucy can feel the pressure of tears behind her eyes and the prickling of blood beneath her skin, and she can think of no way to save him.

“We can’t blast our way in,” says Wyatt. “Not without allies. And even if we got the Meskwaki to join us, that’d be a hell of a thing to explain in the history books.”

“Reprisals,” says Lucy, tasting the salt of her own tears. “We can’t risk it.”

Rufus sighs. “White people,” he says sadly. “Sorry, guys.”

“Don’t mention it,” says Wyatt with a sigh. “We could try for a diversion, but I don’t think they’d buy it.”

Lucy sits up straighter, and gathers the folds of her cloak around her. “They wouldn’t,” she says. “Not if we did it.”

“I’m going to go ahead and quote Han Solo: I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Luce?” says Wyatt.

“We can’t,” says Lucy, “act directly.” Despite everything, despite long habit and present danger, she feels a little thrill of pride. She has found a solution. She only wishes she didn’t hear the commendation ( _very impressive_ ) in Flynn’s voice. “But we can coordinate.” She meets Wyatt’s eyes. “I don’t think there will be reprisals. Not if we play it right.” Her teeth are almost chattering. “If we… if we can arrange activity that is just unusual enough to draw attention.”  
Wyatt shrugs expressively. “If the troops don’t make it back to the fort…”

“I know,” says Lucy. “There have been wars fought for less.”

“I mean, plus side,” says Wyatt, “it would be hard to make things worse.”

“I would like not to die in 1832,” says Rufus. “Are we doing this, or are we going home and explaining to Denise that we lost her agent? That bit I’m fine with, but we’d also have to tell Jiya.”

“We’re doing it,” says Wyatt. “Right, Luce?”

Lucy shivers, but she rises to her feet, and she stands tall. “I think we have to.”

If she’s honest with herself, even the moral obligation to rescue Flynn feels like a luxury they cannot take for granted at this point. But there is also necessity. She knows that he was taken because, while Rufus was pilot and Wyatt was soldier and she herself was strategist, he was all three. So Lucy breathes a prayer to the God she hopes is listening, and tries to remember her grad school reading on the midwestern territories, and strides out to negotiate with the Sauk and the Meskwaki. 

When they do have to get past the stockade, it is Wyatt who leads them. He is appropriately uniformed, confident, plausible. Not for the first time, Lucy is grateful for his skill in understanding how to evade the trained suspicion of the soldier.

There are, of course, no sound-proofed rooms here. There are no spaces dug into the earth, no jail cells set apart. And in some ways, Lucy thinks, that is worse: that the men here accept the inflicting of pain as part of their daily business. _Why, this is hell, nor are we out of it._ The only knowledge she has to guide her is that of observation: sleeping quarters, rifle room, granary, kitchen…

Lucy finds him tied to a pole. It is, of course, crudely effective. And she is chilled, thinking about the implications: they wanted him on the edge of the fortification, vulnerable to attack, far from the gates whence help might come. But she doesn’t think it has dislocated his shoulders, not yet.

“Flynn.” She tells herself that she must not cry, not now. “Flynn.” She cannot reach to untie his hands, she cannot tell if the welts on his back are infected, she cannot tell what else has been done to him…. Lucy takes a deep breath, and climbs on to a three-legged stool. “Flynn, it’s me. It’s all right,” she says, and finds to her own astonishment that she believes it.

When she cuts him down, he goes to his knees like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Flynn,” says Lucy again, hearing the edge of terror in her own voice. His throat clicks, and she reaches for the bucket of water that had been set by the stool. She hopes it is no worse than stale; at least the tin cup bodes well. “Flynn,” says Lucy. Fumblingly, desperately, she reaches for his head; she cannot bring herself to look at his face.

He drinks, and chokes, and retches. And then, astonishingly, breathlessly, he laughs. “Lucy.”

“Yes.”

“I should have known.”

“You shouldn’t talk.”

He reaches out a groping hand for hers. When he finds it, he holds it like the world’s one firm promise, or its most fragile offering. “ ’S beautiful,” he says.

Lucy blinks away tears. “What is?”

“There are birds,” he says, “and trees.” He sits back, getting his weight under him. He will not let go of her hand.

Very hesitantly, Lucy moves to put her other arm around his shoulders, as lightly as she can. “Yes,” she says simply. The prairie grasses are rich with flowers; the air is rich with their scent. Above them, swifts dart and chitter. “Yes.” Beneath her hand, she can feel the quick pulsing of his blood. He leans his head against her shoulder. Perhaps, thinks Lucy, it has always been this simple. Perhaps it has always been this profound. Perhaps, she thinks, the hell surrounding them will always be less important than this: his heartbeat under her fingers, her hand in his, her arrival like his homecoming.


	14. Swingin' on a Star

“Come on,” says Lucy, “it’s past one o’clock. All good time-travelers should be in bed.”

Flynn does not look up from the scattered offprints. “We don’t know what Rittenhouse is planning, and if this Latin means what I think it means… damn eighteenth-century intellectuals…”

Lucy sings under her breath: “His back is brawny but his brain is weak. He’s just plain stupid with a — stubborn streak.” 

“Lucy.”

“What? I thought you were a Bing Crosby fan.”

Half a heartbeat more he is motionless. Then he smiles; rising, he takes her hand, and lets her lead him to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This drabble features and is named after this Bing Crosby hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CDs067081E


	15. Movie Night

They are not alone. Most of the team is gathered in front of the television’s flickering light. Denise, of course, is home. As the months of fighting Rittenhouse drag on, this becomes harder not to resent. Connor is in his room. 

“I plead the privilege of age,” he had said, “not to subject myself either to those formless chairs or that pathetic couch. Whisky and the work for me.”

“Have fun being a genius,” Rufus had replied with a yawn. And that left the rest of them, clustered together in the space they have come to call the living room.

Jiya and Rufus had jointly claimed one of the beanbag chairs. (“I know,” Denise had said, dropping them off. “But the budget is limited and we had these at the house.” “Thank Mark and Olivia for us,” said Lucy, before anyone could protest.) Whether Jiya is asleep or not is, by this point, an irrelevant question. She is curled into Rufus’ side as if she belongs there, as if she desires to be nowhere else. Her legs are slung over his knees, and she has one hand under his shirt and the other on his chest. Rufus has been watching her instead of _Casablanca_ for the last twenty minutes.

“Wyatt Logan,” Lucy had said sternly, as he hovered with his popcorn, “don’t you even think about sitting on the floor.” He had stopped hovering, and merely looked sheepish. “The chill will get into your wound from 1937, and you will develop a fever, and quite possibly _die._ ”

“You say that so authoritatively that it’s almost as though you didn’t get your medical training in the nineteenth century.”

“That’s his fault,” Lucy returned promptly.

“What’s my fault?”

“That I’m sitting on the beanbag chair, apparently,” said Wyatt. “Sorry, Flynn.”

“I don’t…”

“Doesn’t matter.” Lucy had reached for Flynn’s popcorn and swung her legs up to make room for him in a single motion, and Rufus had tried and failed to suppress a chuckle.

So here they are, popcorn long since abandoned to the floor. Wyatt has his head back and his mouth open in sleep. Lucy has, by gradual stages, rearranged herself so that she is lying against Flynn’s chest. _If we stop breathing, we’ll die_ , says Victor Laszlo. _If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die._ Rick quips that it’ll be out of its misery, and Flynn’s arm tightens around Lucy’s waist. Lucy remains motionless, watching Laszlo plead for his wife’s safety, even at the cost of losing her. _You love her that much?_

Lucy flattens her palm against Flynn’s chest, against his heart. And then she lifts herself up, almost silently, to cover his mouth with hers. For a moment he is almost completely still, and then his other arm goes around her, and he kisses her as though nothing else mattered. _It seems,_ says Rick Blaine, _that destiny has taken a hand._


	16. Respite

She can’t seem to stop shaking. Lucy almost hopes she's coming down with something, as long as it’s not something she brought back with her from 1830 London. They were a few years too early for the cholera outbreak — but also too early for sanitation reform. And Lucy thinks about slums and slavery and people trying to save the world, to stir others to compassion and outrage. And she can't stop shaking.

They’d all been very kind. Connor had given her whisky in a teacup, and sweetened tea in a second teacup. Denise had produced from somewhere a lumpy blanket with the Starfleet emblem knitted into one corner. And Lucy had retired to bed early. She tries to take deep breaths, tries to force herself to relax. Part of her wishes that she could be sick, or that she could just pass out and be spared her own misery.

The door slides open. It’s never quiet, but she can tell he's trying to be careful. She’s sure he won’t be fooled into thinking she’s asleep, but she pulls the blanket over her head anyway. The filing cabinet creaks when he gets out his sleep clothes — a strangely homely sound. She allows herself to drift a little, listening to Flynn on the other side of the room. Wordlessly he lies down next to her, and she shivers. Lucy holds very still; she doesn’t want to impose on him with… whatever this is.

Flynn puts a hand on her shoulder, and she can’t bring herself to mind. She feels that she should mind, somehow, that she shouldn’t let him… But his hands are warm and strong and working at the tension that she can't figure out how to release, and Lucy drifts. She gives a small sigh, and feels his own release of breath like its echo, like its continuation. She drifts.

“I love you.” 

Suddenly, she is very much awake. “What?” She’s sure she didn’t mishear him. But she is simultaneously convinced that that _can’t_ be right, that there must be some kind of mistake.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” He places a kiss against her nape. Again Lucy holds herself still. Is he going to tell her to go back to sleep? Flynn runs a hand through her hair — fingers gentle against her temple, her scalp, tracing the lines of her bones. “I love you.” The syllables emerge as though he had savored their foreignness in his mouth, as though his tongue had shaped them for the first time. “I love you.”

_Honey_ , thinks Lucy, on the edge of consciousness. _For centuries, people have placed honey on wounds, a sweetness that heals. How unexpected, and how wonderful, that honey should clean and cure, and ease old scars._ She thinks that she should tell Flynn this; it seems important that he should know. But instead, she falls asleep in his arms.


	17. Baltimore, 1812

Sitting in the prow of the dinghy, her fingers tangled in her lover’s hair, Lucy reflects that the mission has gone better than they had any right to expect. Wyatt, of course, had been their soldier, slipping duplicitously between encampments. It still comes as a bit of a surprise to her, somehow, to see him at work. He’s covering the shore with his rifle (and the twenty-first century handgun lying loose on his knees) but they’re safely out of range now, his coat the signal to the ships that they are allies. The September night is mild around them, and Lucy reflects contentedly that they’ve worked well together. She recalls the words of Fort McHenry’s commander: _Were I to name any individual who signalized themselves, it would be doing injustice to the others._ The siege is still active, but Rittenhouse’s agents are dead, their ruse foiled, their sabotage of transport routes forestalled. And now, under the rockets’ red glare, they’re heading home. 

She’s good at being a spy; it’s strangely like being a historian, in many ways. And she could even become an academic — it’s not unheard of, though the linked name of a husband tended to help with publication. For a giddy instant, she imagines shaking Flynn awake: _Hey, want to be stowaways back here? We could move to London, establish ourselves, rewrite academic history._ But Rufus’ steady pull at the oars will take them downriver and around the headland to where they have stowed the Lifeboat. (Rufus had thrived on being a shipwright. As he gleefully observed, it was basically a version of his own job. She only hopes that accounts of fabulous Wakandan building techniques don’t make it into the 1812 newspapers. The nineteenth-century British Navy doesn’t need help ruling the waves.)

“Hmm?” says Flynn drowsily. She wonders if it might become inconvenient, over the course of a lifetime, having him respond so easily to the currents of her agitation.

“I have one regret about this mission,” says Lucy aloud.

“The ruin of my devilish good looks?”

“Besides that.” Lucy smiles indulgently down at him. His eyebrows will grow back. The burns may be painful and exhausting, but they’re not seriously dangerous. She chooses not to be alarmed by the fact that ‘both setting and escaping a fire involving large quantities of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century explosives’ counts as a fairly uneventful mission for them all.

“Francis Scott Key,” says Lucy.

“Hmm?” says Flynn again.

“The US national anthem,” she explains. “It’s kind of stupid. And creepily militaristic. And,” she adds, “freakishly difficult to sing.”

Flynn opens one eye. “Vanity, vanity,” he says, and begins to cough.

“Hush, you.” There’s probably no reason that putting her hand on his chest should help, but she does it anyway, and he covers it with his. Part of her wants to kiss him until the taste of smoke burns her own throat. But that can wait, Lucy tells herself; that can wait.


	18. 1941-present

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's my firm headcanon that the Time Team goes to Köln in 1941, but I've never succeeded in writing the mission fic for it. Still, I think the first line of this snippet is something Rufus deserves to say, so here this goes. (More of the aftermath of Köln 1941 can be found in "Polyglot." The convalescence from typhoid follows on from " 'tis of centuries come and go.")

“I never want this much blood or yelling in my Lifeboat ever again!”

“Okay.” Lucy is still a little breathless. “Sorry.”

“Sorry, Rufus,” echoes Wyatt.

“Sorry,” says Flynn in his turn.

“You’d better be.” Rufus powers up the switchboard. “The floor may never be the same. And no one believes you when you say you’re fine.”

“ _Das stimmt_ ,” muses Flynn. “I wonder why that is.”

“Yeah,” says Wyatt, doing up the other man’s belt. “It’s a real mystery. You know that the Gestapo shooting people for snarking at them was a thing that happened, right?”

“I thought — _Scheiße_ —I thought that was Hollywood. Is ‘snark’ a real word, Logan?”

“Oh, do be quiet,” says Lucy. Her voice breaks on the last word. 

Rufus heaves a sigh of relief. “There we go. Always a good time to leave Nazi Germany.” And, with a ferocious clanking of gears, they do.

“Connor,” calls Rufus as he disembarks, “we need to get this thing’s fuel capacity up yesterday.”

“Good thing for you I did.” Jiya pulls him in for a kiss. “I’ll show you later. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing — I could always call Triple-A if we didn’t have enough juice to get out of the freaking industrial belt of the freaking Nazis in freaking 1941.”

“…You know it’s really cute when you’re trying not to swear?”

“I lived with my mom, remember? Kiss me again.”

“Where is everyone?” 

Rufus hastily straightens. “Agent Christopher. Ma’am. Trying to figure out how to carry a man who’s 6’4” and stubborn.”

“Gangway,” calls Wyatt. “If he says he’s fine, ignore him.”

“Chair hold,” observes Rufus. “Nice. Flashbacks to fifth-grade summer camp.”

“Is anyone,” asks Denise, “going to update me on the success of the mission?”

“Absolutely,” says Flynn, and his speech is only slightly slurred. “Thanks to Lucy’s seductive genius and Wyatt’s gift for behaving like an asshole…”

“Thanks,” interjects Wyatt, still crab-walking rather gingerly down the stairs. “I’ll be sure to be nicer the next time I’m saving your life.”

“…We stole the plans, torched some paperwork, and prevented the Nazis from getting their hands on nuclear power. Well, Lucy did. We were the diversion.”

“Will you shut up!” says Lucy.

“All right.” Flynn’s reply is gentle. “You can put me down now.” 

“Not a chance.”

“Well done, Lucy. And all of you. Flynn?” Denise’s voice turns hard-edged.

“Shoulders and feet,” he explains, wincing as Lucy and Rufus change places. “Can’t walk properly, can’t be dragged.” He grimaces. “Dead weight. I did suggest to Logan that he might — realign the joints — ”

“Let’s see you be smart when we have to disinfect the soles of your feet, you crazy bastard.”

“Mm.”

“I would like to reiterate,” says Rufus, “that we prevented the Nazis from building an H-bomb. Also, I don’t get paid enough to put up with them.”

“ ’S true,” says Flynn. “Logan, I’m going to — ”

“Thank _god_ ,” says Wyatt, as Flynn slumps against his shoulder. “I’ve been willing him to pass out since we got in the Lifeboat.”

Denise sighs. “Okay. For future reference, ‘Mission successful; no injuries requiring the involvement of an outside medical officer’ is an appropriate response.” As she follows Wyatt and Rufus, she mutters, “And of course he’s ruined his shoes. As if it weren’t hard enough finding things for a man his size in the first place…”

“I’m taking bets,” Mason informs Jiya and Lucy, “on how long it takes her to make him a pair of slippers.”

“Lucy?” says Jiya. “Earth to Lucy? Hello?”

“Damn,” says Mason. “Here. Lucy.” She takes the teacup from his hands, drinks, begins to cough, her eyes watering. “Don’t worry,” he adds kindly, “it isn’t the good stuff. Medicinal purposes. Drink up.” 

Lucy nods shakily, obeys. The lumpy blanket Jiya grabs from the back of the sofa is a group creation, knitted by anyone with a spare moment and idle hands. It had all started during Flynn’s convalescence from typhoid; by day three, Denise had declared that she was teaching him to knit for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Jiya herself was the proud contributor of the Starfleet emblem in the corner.

“Hey, Lacey,” says Jiya, “what’s wrong? Other than Nazis being the worst?”

“The worst thing,” says Lucy, “is that they were so damn smug. So damn petty. I mean, I’ve read Hannah Arendt, but…” Her tears spill over, and she wipes them roughly away. “It’s different, being there. And it was like — like having to deal with the worst jerk you’ve ever met at a party.” She takes a deep breath. “While trying to save the world at the same time. No pressure.”

“You are,” says Mason, “indubitably a heroine, and you can switch over to the good whisky anytime you like.”

“I,” says Lucy, her breath hitching a little, “I didn’t know if Wyatt and Flynn would get out, even if I did. If they blew Wyatt’s cover I was done for, or I would have had to talk him out, and… and even if Wyatt was safe, Flynn…”

“We may have to leave someone behind,” says Mason softly, “one of these days.”

“Yeah.” Lucy finishes her whisky. “But not today. And not in the hands of the Gestapo.”

“No,” says Jiya quickly, shooting a glance at Mason over Lucy’s head. “No, definitely not.” She’s rubbing Lucy’s back in soothing circles, as though she were back in college, administering consolation for some more mundane catastrophe. “Do you want to hear all about our technological genius, or watch stupid television?”

Lucy takes a deep breath, looks up at Jiya. “Stupid television?”

“Awesome.”


	19. Recovery

Garcia Flynn is tired. He is tired with the kind of bone-deep weariness that he had half-forgotten. He is grateful, for the first time in quite a while, for the solitude of his room. It seems much the easiest thing to simply drift, apart from the others. Exhaustion is enough to numb his limbs, but not his thoughts. It never is enough; and that is perhaps the cruelest thing of all.

He knows, of course, why they were willing to make use of him in the first place. Lucy’s trust he had won without deserving but… the fact remains. He is very, very good at violence: strategic and relentless and, most of all, pitiless. That, Flynn thinks, is Wyatt’s weakness: he has always remained open to pity. Although — he catches himself up — if it is a weakness, it is one of a strangely resilient hope. And that hope is something he finds himself very ready to envy.

He tells himself that it was a successful mission. Emma (damn her) was nowhere to be found, but they have Jess. They have Jess. Flynn tries to tell himself that this is not a hollow victory. He tries to tell himself that he shouldn’t mind the way it happened. But he cannot help wishing that they had not seen him like that. That Lucy hadn’t seen him like that. They have always known what he is — what he has become. Still. He tells himself that it is three kinds of folly (to say nothing of vanity) to wish that they had not been confronted by the corpses he left in his wake, by the final sight of him covered in other men's blood. Only Wyatt had looked unsurprised. Rufus had looked frightened, and there had been tears in Jiya’s eyes, and… he had not been able to look at Lucy’s face for long.

There is a knock at his door. “Flynn?” He holds very still. “Garcia?”

He schools his breathing. Part of him hopes that Lucy will think he is asleep, that she will go back to the others. But even this silence feels like a lie of omission, another sin against her, who deserves nothing but gentleness. More gentleness than she could ever find in a hardened and sharp-edged thing like himself. 

“Hey,” says Lucy, against the edge of the door, where it does not quite meet the metal siding. _Clever girl._ “Denise has taken Jess for debriefing; Wyatt went with them. We’re pretending that Rufus and Jiya are having a loud video game marathon and not loud sex. It might be both.” _Oh, Lucy._ He tells himself that he should get up, that he should go to her, that he should tell her firmly and gently to go, to get some rest. He does not deserve this: her patient, tentative efforts at reestablishing normalcy.

“Connor’s cooking dinner,” says Lucy. He does not think he’s imagining the shaken inflection at the end of the sentence, the uncertainty as she bravely tries to pretend that there is a place for him with them. With her. “At least you know it’s better than me cooking dinner, right?” Oh, Lucy. He tells himself that he should go to her; he hears her slide to the floor. He _wants_ to go to her; a traitorous voice in his head observes that he simply wants her. But neither of those things affects what Lucy deserves.

“I love you.”

He is suddenly, startlingly alert. He tells himself that he must have misheard her -- it is almost a plea with the universe, not to drag her into the maelstrom of his existence, not to wound her like that. He clenches his jaw, clenches his fists in the sheets.

“Flynn,” whispers Lucy, against the corroded surface of the bunker, “I love you.” He is off the bed before she has finished (he cannot suppress a slight groan as his bruises protest) and has the door open almost in the next instant. 

And there, of course, is Lucy, her eyes limpid as she gazes up at him, his own old sweater loose on her body, over her hands. Flynn forces himself to take a deep breath, and extends a hand to help her up.

“Hi,” says Lucy, and slips in, an answer to his wordless invitation. He shuts the door behind them. It almost hurts to look at her; she is radiant with the kind of hope usually associated with animals and small children, and alight with the steely determination that is hers alone.

He takes another breath. “Lucy,” he manages.

“Do you have to sit in the chair?” He turns to face her, and finds her cross-legged on the bed, still regarding him with that heartbreaking confidence. She pats the sheets next to her, and he goes. He finds that he cannot refuse her (he could not refuse her anything.)

“Hey,” says Lucy. She leans her head against his shoulder, and oh! it is too much and he flinches away, grasping her shoulders… Strangely, Lucy seems to take this as an invitation to a different sort of contact, and simply puts her arms around his torso, hums contentedly as she unfolds her legs to swing them across his lap.

“Lucy.”

“Yes?”

“Lucy,” says Flynn again, his voice thick with desperation, and he cannot think of anything else to say, anything that would not hurt her. She has been hurt too much already.

“Yes? You can always,” she adds, “say… say you don't want this.”

“Dear God, Lucy.” Almost involuntarily his arms go around her, tighten around her narrow shoulders. Again she makes a small, satisfied sound — as though she asked nothing better than to find him in his misery and take his fragments as her shelter.

Flynn swallows. “Lucy?” She doesn't move, and he dares to raise a hand to her hair. “Lucy, I — I cannot imagine not loving you. But I — ”

She kisses him. When she draws away (eyes dark and cheeks flushed, the most beautiful thing he has ever seen), she says: “I hope you were not going to say anything about deserving this, Garcia Flynn. I’ve always thought you were a genius.” She takes advantage of his speechlessness to kiss him again. “And I’d hate to be disappointed.”

He pulls her fully to him, then; he murmurs love in all the languages he knows. To Connor’s feigned indignation, they are late for dinner.


	20. a tender look which becomes a habit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The title comes from the prompt that gave rise to this chapter, a definition of love by Peter Ustinov. Lucy quotes Goethe: "Tiefe Wunden schlägt das Schicksal, aber oft heilbare. Wunden, die das Herz dem Herzen schlägt, das Herz sich selber, die sind unheilbar."

She catches him looking at her. At first, after Chinatown, she attributes it to his own exhaustion. Then — when she herself is closer to healing, closer to finding equilibrium — she assumes that he is checking in on her. It is, after all, in his sight that she collapsed; it is to him that she clung. Lucy wonders, sometimes, if she should be worried by that. She wonders, sometimes, if they should talk about it. But they have never seemed to need to. And Flynn is always _there _: working in the kitchen while she, at the table, works through the piles of books that Denise brings her. Or he joins her on the couch for Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Or she takes cheap vodka to his room, and he welcomes her, not only with readiness but with what she can’t help but classify as relief.__

__But then they travel to the Austrian-occupied Piedmont, and attend a performance of Il Trovatore. And during the _miserere_ (“How long death is in coming to one who longs to die!”) she glances over at him, and finds his eyes on her in the darkness. Lucy returns her gaze to the stage. “Farewell, Leonora! I pay for my love of you with my blood; do not, do not forget me — Leonora!” Lucy shivers. The soprano in turn vows her love: “You will see that no earthly love is stronger than mine: it defeated Fate in bitter combat; it will defeat death itself.” Lucy wonders if she can believe in such a possibility. She wonders if Flynn believed it, when she came to him in a bar, with a message from a future she does not know._ _

__The expected riot comes, and Lucy can only watch as Flynn becomes a part of the tide of uniforms, as he plays for time, as bodies fall under his hands, as the soldiers begin to realize he is not one of them. Wyatt descends from the balcony, and Lucy swoons neatly into his arms, and Rufus cuts through the crowd in a French coat. When Flynn rejoins them, three streets away, it is wordlessly. No one dares confront them. Neither Wyatt nor Rufus asks about the blood. And Lucy can feel Flynn’s eyes on her._ _

__After that, she starts wondering. She begins cataloguing — or, more precisely, she begins to discover that her brain has been compiling a catalogue on her behalf. Flynn’s eyes on her in the glow of the Hindenburg, weary and expectant. In a theatre and in a train station, hot and desperate. Then, for a long time, with exhaustion, and something more than that, something between hope and resignation. Lucy tells herself that that makes no sense. And then she tells herself, reluctantly, that it is the gaze of a supplicant: desiring mercy, and expecting none. There had been something, surely, almost like tenderness when they faced each other in Chicago and, later, when he handed her the journal, something like an affection born of long knowledge. And then… then he had howled for her, in rage and need. Lucy tells herself that it cannot possibly be desire that she remembers, from their conversations in the prison. In reflecting on the time since Flynn came to the bunker, Lucy concludes, to her own astonishment, that he has always looked at her with absolute trust._ _

__So it is both a shock and a source of terror when, in 1941, he looks at her with nothing at all behind his eyes. She cannot tell whether or not it is an act. He is on his knees, with a gun at his back and blood dried on his face, and of course there should be in his eyes no recognition. But Lucy is still frightened. She concludes her negotiations with her mouth dry. Halfway between the Appellhofplatz and the train station, Wyatt invents an overheard enemy, and maneuvers them and their escort into an alleyway. Lucy watches him and the NS agent disappear. She tries not to listen for the gunshot. Flynn they have left leaning against the wall, and his eyes are closed. Lucy tries not to cry, and tells herself that it would be an unconscionable risk to speak to him, here, almost in the open. Wyatt returns alone, and they take Flynn between them, and change their cover story, and keep walking._ _

__When they return, Lucy is given strong, sweet tea in one teacup and whisky in another. (“Medicinal purposes,” says Connor kindly. “Drink up.”) She takes a shower as hot as she can make it, and changes into her pajamas, and watches stupid television with Jiya. At Wyatt’s insistence, she takes sleeping aids. (“C’mon, Luce. I will if you will.”) And the next day, after a perfunctory knock, she goes into Flynn’s room. At first, all she can see in his eyes is fear. And then his gaze fastens on her. He smiles, and she wishes he hadn’t._ _

__“Hi,” says Lucy. The improbable smile flickers, in amusement or welcome. For what seems a long time they are silent together; Lucy has time to wonder at the fact that he is so open to her. “Can I…” she begins, and has to take another breath before she can finish the sentence. “Can I touch you?” She watches his breath quicken, and he says nothing. But neither does he take his eyes from her face. “Okay,” says Lucy. Very delicately she lays one hand over his wrist. She feels him shiver. And still he looks at her._ _

__“Okay,” says Lucy again. “I ended up double-majoring in German,” she says softly. “Mom was pleased, of course: it was so practical, it would help my grad school applications… But it was my idea. I never imagined I’d have to use it on Nazis, of course. I loved Goethe,” she says. “Clichéd, but true. ‘Fate makes deep wounds, but they can be healed. It’s the wounds inflicted by the heart on itself that are incurable.’”_ _

__“Lucy,” says Flynn, and she breathes more easily._ _

__She looks at his hand, and thinks: _these are his fingers, that have not been broken_. She laces hers between them. “Don’t,” says Lucy, and then has to start again. “Fate has hurt us badly enough,” she says, not looking at his face. “Fate will hurt us badly enough. We mustn’t hurt each other too.”_ _

__“Lucy,” he says again._ _

__“I forgave you long ago,” she says. “I’m not sure I even thought about having to. Don’t think that there’s some sort of penance to be enacted. Don’t think that suffering is what you need to do.” With her thumb she traces circles over the back of his hand, because she can. “It was the best workable plan,” she says firmly, “and of course it was worth it.” She smiles shakily. “We’ve said that about so many things that I could never have imagined… well. Just — Flynn — never think that you deserve it, or that we don’t care, that I don’t…” She looks up, and finds him looking at her, and bursts into tears._ _

__“You never said anything,” she manages, a choked whisper between sobs. “You never said… and don’t you dare say anything now, Garcia Flynn, or I’ll — I’ll — I’ll have hysterics and I’m sure that counts as overexciting the patient and I probably shouldn’t even be here and…”_ _

__“Lucy.”_ _

__Gradually, raggedly, Lucy catches her breath. “Okay,” she says. “Can I stay?” For answer, his hand tightens on hers._ _

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Fanart] An Untouchable Wish](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20467136) by [UnUnpredictableMe (DraejonSoul)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraejonSoul/pseuds/UnUnpredictableMe)




End file.
